I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.

- William Blake

Thursday, March 07, 2024

Update on the wilderness encounter book

I spent most of last weekend working on my wilderness encounter book for B/X.

The first part is a simplification of the random encounter procedure. I like how that turned out; I'll publish most of it in this post blog soon.

The third part describes 366 days in the wilderness. Basically, weather, encounters and a few details for variety.

These parts are mostly finished by now.

The second part is the hardest. It describes, very succinctly, ONE THOUSAND random encounters, with most necessary rolls (number appearing, surprise, reaction). This is how it looks right now:


This was a bit harder than I thought. Rolling dice thousands of times was easy with the help of apps and AI. Same for adding names to NPCs. 

The hardest part right now is "confused wolves". 

I had a hard time thinking of hundreds of variations for what's the monsters are doing. 

I could certainly take some inspiration from this amazing blog d4 caltrops, but I still feel it will get somewhat repetitive anyway. Most aggressive animals and beasts are just hungry or territorial - I can think of a few alternatives, but not hundreds of them.

At least intelligent NPCs, dragons, etc. are looking pretty good IMO.

B/X descriptions are very terse, so I have to add a few details from other sources.

Anyway, it's lots of work, but maybe it is worth it if other people find the book useful. 

Well, at least I've been using it in my own sandbox campaign.

And I've been learning a lot about B/X monsters and encounter tables (mountains are VERY dangerous, and troglodytes are SCARY - 5d8 appearing, 2HD, camouflaged, attack everyone).

So for now what I ask you to do, is let me know if that looks interesting/useful, or if you'd change anything.

If this looks interesting and you and want to provide even more feedback, consider joining my discord channel to discuss it.

The book will take a couple of moths or more to complete, but at this point I am pretty confident that it WILL be completed.

BTW: let me know if you have any reservations about the use of apps and AI for dice rolls, random names, etc.

No comments:

Post a Comment